Good to be connecting with you again. Our topic for today is common and deadly decision traps, and how to avoid them. Recall that in the previous article we spoke about the structure of extraordinary decision making, and I explained the steps you have to follow to make excellent outcomes happen. As you follow the steps, it’s important to watch out for a handful of places where most people consistently make mistakes. I will point out two of them today, explain how to sidestep each one and top it off with a simple way to turn hesitation into decisiveness. Your job, of course, is to be honest with yourself, notice what you need to work on, and learn how to improve your decision muscle.
FIRST TRAP of plunging in:

Ok, the first major trap happens even before the deciding starts. It’s the trap of plunging in headfirst into the deciding without pausing to answer one critical question: What’s the essence of the problem?

Let’s take our decision example from last week: “How do I double my salary?” If you jump in to answer this question without thinking, you might answer the wrong question altogether. Ask yourself first: “What’s the essence of the problem?” Are you even seeing the different possibilities? Consider these and notice just how much they differ:
- You need to make more money.
- You want to feel that your work is valued appropriately.
- You are looking for another challenge.
- Your spouse is beating you over the head demanding that you earn more.
- You want to bolster your self-esteem.

Do you see how each of these completely changes the underlying decision, and will necessarily lead to different alternatives and outcomes? For example, if you are looking for another challenge, then you won’t take up the job washing dishes in a restaurant. If, on the other hand, it’s about your self-esteem, then the simplest solution might be invest in a couple of hours of NLP coaching to quickly improve your self-esteem that way.

If you are not aware of the essence of the problem, then you will randomly pick one and it’s often the wrong one. Just think how many times have you thought you really wanted something, went out and bought it, and a few days later felt as dissatisfied as your were before the purchase. You’ve been solving the wrong problem!

SECOND TRAP of frame blindness:

The second major decision trap is frame blindness. Recall from the last newsletter that framing the decision happens in languaging the question that you pose. Framing is inevitable, and it brings some aspects of the problem into the focus, while pushing others into the background.

One subtle and influential frame effect is hidden inside the unspoken beliefs you have about what is possible. These beliefs form the boundaries of your map of the world. If you don’t believe it is possible to triple your salary, then your decision frame will exclude this alternative. If you believe that it is hard to find someone who will love you wholeheartedly, then you will refuse to consider the easy opportunities to meeting such person.

Your beliefs frame your reality. And you know what? Most of them are arbitrary. What’s even worse, most of the beliefs you’ve got were installed into your mind without your awareness by your well-meaning family, friends, school, and culture. Unfortunately well-meaning is not the same as wise. All this happened when you were a small child and quite gullible. If we laid out your beliefs on a flat table in front of your eyes and you examined them right now, you would find many of them silly, outdated and false.

So, how can you avoid this trap of unspoken beliefs? Whenever you pose a decision question, ask yourself: “What will always remain true in any answer to this question?” Take, for instance, the decision: “How do I double my salary?” Regardless of the answer, you will be looking for ways to increase the salary and not to save the money. And you will be looking for a job where someone pays you a salary. Once the beliefs presupposed by the question become clear, choose whether you want to expand the frame or leave it as it is. (As an exercise, count all the unspoken beliefs inside the “Where can I find the love of my life?” decision.)

All right, enough about traps. You’ve listened attentively, you’ve learned well, you followed the extraordinary decision making steps and you carefully avoided the traps. Now is finally the right time to make the decision and take the first action. BUT, what’s that? What are those unbidden questions in your mind: “Have I really thought this through?” “Is there something I haven’t considered?” “What else could I do?”

Stalling. Hesitating. Feeling afraid of closing the doors on other opportunities. Because by making the decision you commit to one path and close off all the others. If you are of the kind that likes to keep her options open, then deciding means trouble.

Oh-oh. What to do? Well, if I was your coach working with you 1 on 1, then there are a few hundred of different possibilities we could explore to find the right solution for you. But, not having this luxury, here is a cookie cutter approach that often works right out of the box. Ask yourself: “How many opportunities am I missing right now by deciding to become rigid with hesitation?” Most people rarely consider the cost of not making the decision right away, and so rarely feel the urgency. This question moves you beyond hesitation into action. And, as you well know, decisions are lifeless until you take the first step. NOW.

You’ve just read TIP #85 FOR CREATING AN EXTRAORDINARY AND MEANINGFUL LIFE brought to you by Holographic University. To get the next Tip visit us at:

http://www.HolographicUniversity.com/magazinesignup.php?w=Tip85

May You Be Happy!
- Arman Darini, Ph.D.

Arman Darini, Ph.D. is the director of Holographic University, the author of weekly Tips for Creating an Extraordinary and Meaningful Life, and a certified international http://www.HolographicUniversity.com/nlpguide.php Trainer. As the leader of a dynamic team of Life Trainers and Coaches, Arman’s motto is “I don’t believe in your limitations”. To learn more about Arman, visit http://www.ArmanDarini.com

Often, it is useful to assess an event or outcome from several different perspectives: From our own perspective, from the perspective of another person and from the perspective of an independent observer. John Grinder and Judith DeLozier refer to these perspectives as perceptual positions. Perceptual positions provide a balanced approach to thinking about an event or outcome. In situations where there is little or no understanding or progress, they can provide a way of developing new understandings and creating new choices.

The three perceptual positions are:

First Position: seeing, hearing and feeling the situation through your own eyes, ears and feelings. You think in terms of what is important to you, what you want to achieve.

Second Position: stepping into the shoes of the other person and experiencing (seeing, hearing and feeling) the situation as if you were them. You think in terms of how this situation would appear or be interpreted by the other person. You’ve heard the expression: “Before criticizing someone, walk a mile in their shoes.”

Third Position: standing back from a situation and experiencing it as if you were a detached observer. In your mind, you are able to see and hear yourself and the other person, as if you were a third person. You think in terms of what opinion, observations or advice would someone offer who is not involved. You need to be in a strong resourceful state and take an objective view of your own behaviour and look for opportunities to respond differently in order to achieve a different and more positive outcome.

Sometimes we get stuck in one of these positions:

Someone who lives his/her life in first position would tend to focus on his/her needs rather than the needs of others — a “self-centered” attitude. We could say that addicts tend to see the world from first position.

Someone, who lives their life primarily in second position, is always thinking about the other person at the expense of their own needs. Co-dependents or enablers in a dysfunctional or addiction situation would fit this description. A saying about co-dependents is: “When a co-dependent dies, someone else’s life flashes before their eyes, rather than their own”.

Someone, who lives in third position, would be seen as rather aloof and a disinterested observer of life – always on the outside looking in.

All three positions are of equal importance and it is useful to consciously or unconsciously cycle through these positions as we go about our daily activities.

An Exercise

To illustrate the usefulness of perceptual positions, consider the following exercise, which you can do alone or have someone guide you through the steps. Think of a conversation, discussion or disagreement that you had recently with another person that did not go as well as you had hoped and the situation remains unresolved. For ease of discussion, I will assume the other person is a male.

Are you prepared to explore this situation to find other ways to handled it, should a similar situation occur in the future? This is an important question. If you are committed to holding the other person as wrong and not prepared to learn from your experiences, no matter what, then it is not worth your time proceeding for this particular situation. Pick another situation.

Assuming you answered, “yes” to the first question, get yourself into a comfortable position, close your eyes and go back to that event looking through your own eyes seeing what you saw, hearing what you heard and feeling what you felt during that interaction. You can do this quickly, as the purpose here is mainly to remind you of the event and what you experienced. Here you are experiencing the event from first position. When you are finished, open your eyes, look around the room, stand, stretch your body – this is called a break state and the intention is to clear your mind of the internal representations (see NLP Communication Model Part II) of the event.

Again make yourself comfortable, close your eyes and this time put yourself into the other person’s body, take on his physiology looking through his eyes, seeing what he saw, hearing what he heard, and to the best of your ability experiencing how he felt being to be in a conversation with the person that looks and acts like you! From this other perspective, notice the facial expressions, body language, hand gestures, tone of voice and words that are used by this person that looks, behaves and sounds like you. Does this give you some understanding of why he reacted the way he did? If you were to give the person that looks like you some advice, from this perspective, on how to handle the situation differently, what would that advice be? When you are ready, open your eyes, look around the room, stand up and stretch. Did you learn something about yourself and how you could handle it differently next time with potentially a different result? Often people do and sometimes, they learn even more in the next step.

Make yourself comfortable, close your eyes and this time look at the event as if you were a fly on the wall. Some distance in front of you, you can see a person that looks, behaves and sounds like you and the other person(s). From this other perspective, notice the facial expressions, body language, hand gestures, tone of voice and words that that this person who looks, behaves and sounds like you is using. Can you give this person some advice on how the situation could be handled differently and just maybe achieve a different, more positive result? When you are ready, open your eyes, look around the room, stand up and stretch. How about this time, did you learn something about yourself?

Repeat steps 2 -5. This time use the new behaviours and resources that you identified in steps 3 and 4. Did you notice anything different this time? Perhaps, an opportunity to achieve a different more positive result?

I often use this exercise in public presentations. I remember at one event, as I finished the exercise, a young lady got out of her chair and quickly left the room. She returned to the room about 20 minutes later and at the next break came up to me and apologized for leaving the room the way she had. She went on to explain that about two weeks earlier, she had had a major fight with her roommate and long-time close friend that resulted in her moving out and the two of them had not spoken to each other since. As a result of doing the exercise, she realized how she could have handled the situation differently and left the room to have a conversation with her friend. As a result of this new conversation, she was moving back in with her friend and roommate that very evening.

This reminds me of two NLP Presuppositions: ‘The system (person) with the most flexibility of behaviour will have the most influence on the system’ and ‘There is no failure only feedback’ and the second of the Five Steps for Success — take action!

Have fun with this exercise, it is easy to do and very powerful!

You can use perceptual positions to review an event in the past or to prepare for an event in the future.